The Toilette

In the spring of 1890 Paris filled up with Japanese woodblock prints. A large exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts hung hundreds of them, and Mary Cassatt, in her mid-40s, went back to it again and again. What she saw sent her home to try something few Western artists had attempted: her own set of ten colour prints in drypoint and aquatint, a slow and unforgiving technique she taught herself with a hired printer at her house north of Paris. This sheet is one of the ten. A young woman bends over a washstand, her sleeves pushed back, caught in the plain act of washing. The flattened room, the patterned wallpaper, the striped gown held close to the surface all come from the prints of Utamaro, borrowed and resettled in a French bedroom. Cassatt inked and pulled each impression by hand, adjusting the colour plate by plate, so no two copies are quite the same.